Cellular xenotransplantation of animal cells into people: benefits and risk

The main benefit of xenotransplantation is its potential to overcome the worldwide organ shortage experienced in allotransplantation. Allogeneic transplantation is the only successful therapy for several life-threatening diseases, with cell, tissue or organ donation only partially meeting the demand and many patients dying while waiting for treatment. With supply falling short of demand, it is foreseen that the use of porcine material may at some stage overcome the existing gap between organ availability and clinical need. Recently, pig islet cells have been utilised in clinical trials, with safety being demonstrated. Indeed, pig-derived cells present several advantages: i) porcine cells have a stable function and differentiation pattern and are not tumorigenic; ii) pig cells have been shown to meet the physiological needs in large animal models; iii) the source of pig cells can be scaled up to meet demands in a highly standardised manner, and with respect to animal welfare regulations; iv) ‘designated-pathogen-free’ (DPF) pig lines can be produced, which could result in a higher safety profile than allotransplantation itself; v) the risk of zoonosis, which was raised years ago as the major hurdle, has been recently circumvented and is actually viewed as a controlled risk; and vi) immune risks are being circumvented via the use of genetically modified donor animals and encapsulation of porcine cells, particularly for the treatment of diabetes. Overall, the benefit appears to outweigh potential risks with respect to cellular xenotransplantation and this is discussed further in this review

John Fredrik Seedoff: Augustana Alum of 1886

John Seedoff was a graduate from Augustana in 1886. We will discuss his career as a pastor, his family history, and his genealogy. We will include when he arrived at Augustana, and what he did as a student here

Non-uniqueness for the nonlocal Liouville equation in R\mathbb{R} and applications

We construct multiple solutions to the nonlocal Liouville equation \begin{equation} \label{eqk} \tag{L} (-\Delta)^{\frac{1}{2}} u = K(x) e^u \quad \mbox{ in } \mathbb{R}. \end{equation} More precisely, for $K$ of the form $K(x) = 1+\varepsilon \kappa(x)$ with $\varepsilon \in (0,1)$ small and $\kappa \in C^{1,\alpha}(\mathbb{R}) \cap L^{\infty}(\mathbb{R})$ for some $\alpha > 0$, we prove existence of multiple solutions to \eqref{eqk} bifurcating from the bubbles. These solutions provide examples of flat metrics in the half-plane with prescribed geodesic curvature $K(x)$ on its boundary. Furthermore, they imply the existence of multiple ground state soliton solutions for the Calogero-Moser derivative NLS

Multi-aspect testing and ranking inference to quantify dimorphism in the cytoarchitecture of cerebellum of male, female and intersex individuals: a model applied to bovine brains.

The dimorphism among male, female and freemartin intersex bovines, focusing on the vermal lobules VIII and IX, was analyzed using a novel data analytics approach to quantify morphometric differences in the cytoarchitecture of digitalized sections of the cerebellum. This methodology consists of multivariate and multi-aspect testing for cytoarchitecture-ranking, based on neuronal cell complexity among populations defined by factors, such as sex, age or pathology. In this context, we computed a set of shape descriptors of the neural cell morphology, categorized them into three domains named size, regularity and density, respectively. The output and results of our methodology are multivariate in nature, allowing an in-depth analysis of the cytoarchitectonic organization and morphology of cells. Interestingly, the Purkinje neurons and the underlying granule cells revealed the same morphological pattern: female possessed larger, denser and more irregular neurons than males. In the Freemartin, Purkinje neurons showed an intermediate setting between males and females, while the granule cells were the largest, most regular and dense. This methodology could be a powerful instrument to carry out morphometric analysis providing robust bases for objective tissue screening, especially in the field of neurodegenerative pathologies